Paying Tribute to the Young and Crazy

"How can you ask a couple of cute questions and think you gonna capture thirty years of pain and family...?" This question arises late in Year of the Horse, cult filmmaker Jim Jarmusch's documentary about Neil Young & Crazy Horse. It is aimed directly at Jarmusch (Stranger than Paradise, Night on Earth, Mystery Train) by Crazy Horse guitarist Frank Sampedro in the always interesting one-on-one interviews with band members that make up a large part of the film. Jarmusch doesn't answer, but allows his subject to continue to question his intentions in directing a film about the on-and off-stage struggles and triumphs of a band--a task seemingly incompatible with the image of some "hip New York film guy" who makes "artsy-fartsy movies."

Watching Year of the Horse makes it clear why he doesn't need to answer the question. Although the movie has a very stylized look--Jarmusch uses an array of both color and black and white film stock, including super 8, 16 mm, video, and even animation--it is anything but a pretentious portrait of one of the world's most unpretentious, hard-rocking bands.

The film follows the band on its 1996 world tour, beginning with Crazy Horse members lining up in single file as if for a police lineup. But they aren't the usual rock suspects, nor is this your usual "rockumentary." Neil Young, a hugely successful and influential performer who composed the eternal rock anthem "Rockin' in the Free World," a hit MTV Unplugged album in 1993, and the Oscar-winning title track from Philadelphia, is an amazing artist who more than deserves a serious documentary of his own. Yet Jarmusch, though he does spend time probing Young's past--including his childhood in Canada and his stint as member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young--and establishing his place at the band's center, doesn't hand over Year of the Horse to Young alone. What makes the biographical parts of the film most interesting is that the real focus is Neil Young and Crazy Horse--how they became not just bandmates but brothers: Young (guitar/vocals), Ralph Molina (drums/vocals), Billy Talbot (bass) and Frank "Poncho Sampedro." It's this aspect--their powerful sense of family--that saves their story from being just another tale of a '70s band.

Jarmusch, for whom Young recorded the soundtrack of the underrated gem Dead Man, shows his deep-rooted love for the band through his engrossing, though repetitive, mix of interviews, concerts, and more interviews. He also uses old film footage to fine effect--for example, juxtaposing a scene of a very stoned Neil Young & Crazy Horse circa '76 (bearing an eerie resemblance to the guys from This is Spinal Tap) burning flowers in a Parisian hotel room with clips of the band today as elder statesmen of rock: men with a past that resonates in their music.

But the real reason to see this film is the band in concert; it's there that Jarmusch's best film work emerges. Alternating between up close-and-personal stage shots and seemingly unrelated imagery (traffic on a tree-lined highway, fans in Ireland waiting for a concert), he never tries to outshine the band's performance but rather to complement them. Occasionally he is guilty of some boring visuals: some of the images accompanying the songs feel like rejected film from a lost R.E.M. video.

However, the blaring intensity of the final two songs, "Tonight's the Night" and "Like a Hurricane," in which the band achieves a level of aural glory that most bands can only dream of, more than make up for the infrequent lapses. In both these songs, music and imagery achieve a brilliant synergy: Young's poetic lyrics and thundering guitar are superbly matched by such shots as Jarmusch's cut between the hands of some audience members and the band jamming it up under amazing lighting. You don't have to be a fan of Neil Young & Crazy Horse--or of Jarmusch, for that matter--to enjoy these sequences.

There's a short but unforgettable scene near the end of Year of the Horse, featuring Jarmusch in the only time he's seen on screen, his signature puff of white hair arching towards the ceiling, and Young, as they journey on a tour bus through the French countryside. The director discusses religion with his chief star, i.e., how "God was really pissed in the Old Testament." During their discourse, it becomes plain just how much these men share in common. This moment captures the power of the film as a whole, showing how two apparently disparate cultural figures can come together in one well-balanced fusion of music and film.